8 ms·

Is it possible, even it principle, that some of these exotic hadrons could be long-lived (let alone stable)? They're probably interesting to study on their own

by tux3 4y ago

Is it possible, even it principle, that some of these exotic hadrons could be long-lived (let alone stable)? They're probably interesting to study on their own, but the engineering instinct is to want to build something out of them, or use them as tools, which seems pretty hard if they disintegrate in a quintillionth of a second!

willis936 4y ago
On the surface they might not seem useful, but these discoveries develop sub-atomic models, which help predict atomic, and in turn molecular, models, which helps materials research. There are countless materials we haven't discovered/invented yet. We don't know how far we can push it.
- morbia 4y ago
  I'm not aware of any predictive power the standard model has over nuclear physics and atomic physics directly. In principle, yes the standard model should be able to predict things at those energy scales, in practice no one has a clue how. To use a more relatable analogy, it's a bit like using quantum mechanics to build a skyscraper. In principle it should be possible, it practice it is incalculable. Newtonian physics does the job fine in that scenario.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    If you wanted to build a skyscraper taking into account quantum mechanics then maybe you are hoping to induce a scaled quantum mechanic effect? Perhaps in the ultra-modern evolution of buildings the structure of the building itself will have a communication aspect associated with its natural largess and to accomplish this quantum mechanics is used to derive the appropriate building structure. Just because it sounds far-fetched or hard doesn't mean it won't be humdrum engineering decades or a century in the future. It all starts somewhere.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    You use the quantum mechanics to design the graphene conformation that yield the best loads, and then infuse the concrete in your skyscraper with the graphene. Everything needs abstraction layers otherwise of course the complexity becomes mindboggling.
    - dangerlibrary 4y ago
      As I understand it, this is not really how most practical materials research is done today. Bridging the "scale gap" between nano-scale research, micro-scale research, etc. up to something the size of a foundation for a skyscraper is very hard (read: almost impossible) right now. Those nano-scale research areas are pretty siloed and only in extreme cases like transistor manufacturing is there any meaningful overlap with production use cases. In general, materials researchers for something like concrete are going to be better off exploring the (very large!) high dimensional space of possible formulations of existing concrete ingredients and pushing out the pareto frontier for the best possible concrete that way. Also, one probably shouldn't be using bleeding-edge concrete tech for a skyscraper foundation - in a safety critical application like that you just build it 1.2x bigger than you need and it'll still be much cheaper and safer than a process like what you just described. Materials research is super interesting, though, even if it's not building up from quantum-particle scale research. And atomic / molecular features of inputs can yield interesting material candidates. Source: I work (as a software dev, not a materials researcher) at Citrine Informatics, selling software to assist companies who are trying to do practical materials things like make better concrete.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Your metaphor simply doesn't reflect the reality. Material sciences, condensed matter physics, chemistry and etc work up from the abstraction layer of "atoms". It's a quite well defined and relevant layer. So, until that work brings some different configuration¹ for atoms, they will have no impact at all. 1 - It doesn't need to be as new elements, but even for the resonance between the nucleus and electrosphere they didn't create anything new, and only things affecting the electrosphere matter. (Even then, they didn't create anything new on a nucleus either.)
- dylan604 4y ago
  > We don't know how far we can push it. Like all things in science has any stopped to think if we should push it?
  - bettysdiagnose 4y ago
    Yes, certainly, this isn't Jurassic Park.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      You reply in jest, but I'm not asking to be funny with a movie reference. We see it day in and day out where science has developed something without slowing down to do research into the affects other than the one they are scoped in on while making what they are making. I'm specifically thinking of the new chemical sciences that have brought out some formulas that are great at a specific thing, but are absolutely tragic to nature in so many more ways. The science shows these chemicals to be tragically toxic, yet that info gets shoved in a drawer so inventors can make money. Great, we made something, but we should be able to say thanks but no thanks. Let's put that in the column of good idea, good science tech to achieve, but best left alone. Take that learning and try to achieve the samething in a different manner so that it doesn't kill everything else.
      - empi 4y ago
        There's a clear difference between discovery/development and practical application. The latter is not a problem of science. Shelving discoveries based on the perceived effect they (could) have (who would even evaluate that?) is a slippery slope if I ever seen one.
        dylan604 4y ago
        >Shelving discoveries based on the perceived effect they (could) have (who would even evaluate that?) is a slippery slope if I ever seen one. This is precisely what should happen though. We made ICE powered cars that used leaded gasoline because reasons, but the results of that were horrible for everything except the ICE. We shelved that tech because it was just bad. We've shelved the widespread use of lead in paint. We've shelved the widespread use of asbestos in lots of things. There's nothing wrong with realizing the juice isn't worth the squeeze. We know that it is something that happens. Sometimes we make something that comes with a heavy cost. Obviously we don't have a way to know that until it exists. Then again, we should be able to start recognizing that particular chemical chains results in bad things so we should be super careful with the new thing because it is looks like something we've seen before. We can do this with virus and what not. Why not with chemistry?
- moonchrome 4y ago
  > On the surface they might not seem useful, but these discoveries develop sub-atomic models, which help predict atomic, and in turn molecular, models If those models had predictive power that translates to atomic scale you wouldn't need a multibillion collider to prove them.
  - paskozdilar 4y ago
    If those models didn't have predictive power that translates to atomic scale, nobody would give them billions for a collider to prove them.
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    I 99.99% agree. One of the few molecular level effects that depends on the virtual particles that are important in the standard model is the Lamb shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift In this case the virtual particle is a virtual photon, not a virtual weird particle, so it's just scratching the standard model. I'm not sure if the g-2 Anomalous magnetic dipole moment of electrons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_mome... can be measured with a cheap equipment.
aqme28 4y ago
Typically no, because higher energy collisions exist naturally with cosmic particles, so we would have probably observed some of these stable particles by now. But in practice they could be rare and hard to detect.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  I'm not even sure if "typically no" is justified here. We don't know what dark matter is, but we do know that it appears that there's a lot of it out there. You could definitely do some math and maybe if you were really clever about it relate the quantity of it that exists to exclude some particular energy range of interactions, but I don't think that's been done.
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    The whole point of “dark matter” is it can’t be made of normal matter (ie quarks). (It might not even exist, after all…)
    - zamalek 4y ago
      WIMPs, were they to exist, would consist of regular matter.
      - shagie 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_par... > There exists no formal definition of a WIMP, but broadly, a WIMP is a new elementary particle which interacts via gravity and any other force (or forces), potentially not part of the Standard Model itself, which is as weak as or weaker than the weak nuclear force, but also non-vanishing in its strength. That's not regular matter. Its MACHOs that are made up of regular matter (well, brown dwarfs and black holes). There are also theories that put an undetected form of neutrino as dark matter which would be a bit more regular.
dariusj18 4y ago
It'd be cool if they could be created and combined in specific combinations and quantities to create new particles that wouldn't exist due to natural formation. Sounds like a good sci-fi mechanic, creating new particles without the Higgs Boson to facilitate FTL or at least some sort of anti-gravity.
- simiones 4y ago
  Note that the Higgs Boson has no part in the mass (and presumably gravitational interaction) of elementary fermions like quarks or electrons, and even less to do with the mass of hadrons (whose mass is the mass of quarks + the mass of the extraordinary amount of energy sticking the quarks together, which dwarfs the mass of the quarks by ~100:1). Even if all elementary particles were massless, protons, nuclei, and atoms would still have most of the mass they have today (though of course many other interactions would be very different indeed).
  - jamincan 4y ago
    What is the Higgs Boson responsible for if it's not involved in the mass of fermions or hadrons?
    - simiones 4y ago
      The mass of the massive gauge bosons, the W and Z bosons. Edit: there is an excellent in-depth (but math-light) explanation about the Higgs mechanism by Leonard Susskind. I highly recommend it if you are interested, it lasts about 1h (plus some Q&A) and is extremely approachable, while being presented by an established authority in the field. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY
      - gmadsen 4y ago
        unless im wrong (im not a physicist) interaction with the higgs field does give a none zero amount of mass to quarks. but the vast majority of mass of a proton ~99% is due to the energy in the gluon field
chicX 4y ago
These particles are hadrons held together by the strong force. They all contain charm or strange quarks which are relatively heavy, and via the weak interactions, they can decay to hadrons containing light quarks. Because of the large mass difference between the charm and strange compared with the light quarks, it's unlikely that any of these will be stable. Lone neutrons are unstable, they decay in about 15 minutes to lighter particles. They have only a few MeV mass difference to the stable final state (the proton + electron + anti-neutrino). For comparison, these particles are 2000+ MeV above their ground states so they decay pretty quickly.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  sicne neutrons are stable in a neucleous, is it possible that there is any atom-like structure that is stable that contains at least one 'abnormal' particle, like a bozon, or any 'large' particle made of quarks that is not a proton or neutron?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
at_a_remove 4y ago
No. If a particle can decay into a lighter set of particles and still obey all of the conservation principles, they will. The heavier they are, the more they're going to decay and the more "options" they have to decay. An electron isn't going to do anything because there is nothing lighter than an electron that still carries charge, etc. Something much heavier, like a free neutron, will fall apart into a proton, an electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. These particles have options galore as to what they can fall apart into being, and so they do, and with great haste.
- wesammikhail 4y ago
  I know nothing about physics as it is not my domain. So I don't know if what you're saying is true or not. But if it is, I find that notion somewhat poetic. For the sake of my own edification, I'd like to follow this up with a few somewhat seemingly dumb questions if you dont mind: Is it the case that a given particle is trying to settle into a "lowest energy state" possible? I am not using physics terms here. More like conceptually, are these particles, due to the number of options available to them, decaying into the lightest stable variant allowed by the laws of physics? if that is the case, then could we perhaps find ways to engineer structures within which these particles last for a whole lot longer than they should (on a human timescale)? And what is stopping us from doing that? is it the energy cost associated with such a structure/device or is there a more fundamental reason we cant do that?
  - samstave 4y ago
    (I' in the exact same boat as you) --- >>trying to settle into a "lowest energy state" possible? What if its actually the reverse: Its attempting and succeeding to be the most it can be given the eddy of forces around it - the particle is "becoming" - not "falling apart"
  - sethhovestol 4y ago
    It is the case that particles always try to settle into the lowest energy, and the more options they have the faster. We may be able to engineer places where they're stable, like in the example from my grandparent of a neutron. They are unstable since their mass is greater than the mass of a proton and an electron combined, but they're stable in all common elements we're used to. So much so that we think of radioactive elements as the exception, but (mostly) all that's happening there (in beta decay) is a neutron decaying. I'm not an expert, but I'd imagine making a stable situation for a heavier particle much harder than just making an atom, and the fine grained control is even hard still.

by tux3 4y ago

willis936 4y ago

On the surface they might not seem useful, but these discoveries develop sub-atomic models, which help predict atomic, and in turn molecular, models, which helps materials research. There are countless materials we haven't discovered/invented yet. We don't know how far we can push it.

morbia 4y ago
I'm not aware of any predictive power the standard model has over nuclear physics and atomic physics directly. In principle, yes the standard model should be able to predict things at those energy scales, in practice no one has a clue how. To use a more relatable analogy, it's a bit like using quantum mechanics to build a skyscraper. In principle it should be possible, it practice it is incalculable. Newtonian physics does the job fine in that scenario.
- peteradio 4y ago
  If you wanted to build a skyscraper taking into account quantum mechanics then maybe you are hoping to induce a scaled quantum mechanic effect? Perhaps in the ultra-modern evolution of buildings the structure of the building itself will have a communication aspect associated with its natural largess and to accomplish this quantum mechanics is used to derive the appropriate building structure. Just because it sounds far-fetched or hard doesn't mean it won't be humdrum engineering decades or a century in the future. It all starts somewhere.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  You use the quantum mechanics to design the graphene conformation that yield the best loads, and then infuse the concrete in your skyscraper with the graphene. Everything needs abstraction layers otherwise of course the complexity becomes mindboggling.
  - dangerlibrary 4y ago
    As I understand it, this is not really how most practical materials research is done today. Bridging the "scale gap" between nano-scale research, micro-scale research, etc. up to something the size of a foundation for a skyscraper is very hard (read: almost impossible) right now. Those nano-scale research areas are pretty siloed and only in extreme cases like transistor manufacturing is there any meaningful overlap with production use cases. In general, materials researchers for something like concrete are going to be better off exploring the (very large!) high dimensional space of possible formulations of existing concrete ingredients and pushing out the pareto frontier for the best possible concrete that way. Also, one probably shouldn't be using bleeding-edge concrete tech for a skyscraper foundation - in a safety critical application like that you just build it 1.2x bigger than you need and it'll still be much cheaper and safer than a process like what you just described. Materials research is super interesting, though, even if it's not building up from quantum-particle scale research. And atomic / molecular features of inputs can yield interesting material candidates. Source: I work (as a software dev, not a materials researcher) at Citrine Informatics, selling software to assist companies who are trying to do practical materials things like make better concrete.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Your metaphor simply doesn't reflect the reality. Material sciences, condensed matter physics, chemistry and etc work up from the abstraction layer of "atoms". It's a quite well defined and relevant layer. So, until that work brings some different configuration¹ for atoms, they will have no impact at all. 1 - It doesn't need to be as new elements, but even for the resonance between the nucleus and electrosphere they didn't create anything new, and only things affecting the electrosphere matter. (Even then, they didn't create anything new on a nucleus either.)
dylan604 4y ago
> We don't know how far we can push it. Like all things in science has any stopped to think if we should push it?
- bettysdiagnose 4y ago
  Yes, certainly, this isn't Jurassic Park.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    You reply in jest, but I'm not asking to be funny with a movie reference. We see it day in and day out where science has developed something without slowing down to do research into the affects other than the one they are scoped in on while making what they are making. I'm specifically thinking of the new chemical sciences that have brought out some formulas that are great at a specific thing, but are absolutely tragic to nature in so many more ways. The science shows these chemicals to be tragically toxic, yet that info gets shoved in a drawer so inventors can make money. Great, we made something, but we should be able to say thanks but no thanks. Let's put that in the column of good idea, good science tech to achieve, but best left alone. Take that learning and try to achieve the samething in a different manner so that it doesn't kill everything else.
    - empi 4y ago
      There's a clear difference between discovery/development and practical application. The latter is not a problem of science. Shelving discoveries based on the perceived effect they (could) have (who would even evaluate that?) is a slippery slope if I ever seen one.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        >Shelving discoveries based on the perceived effect they (could) have (who would even evaluate that?) is a slippery slope if I ever seen one. This is precisely what should happen though. We made ICE powered cars that used leaded gasoline because reasons, but the results of that were horrible for everything except the ICE. We shelved that tech because it was just bad. We've shelved the widespread use of lead in paint. We've shelved the widespread use of asbestos in lots of things. There's nothing wrong with realizing the juice isn't worth the squeeze. We know that it is something that happens. Sometimes we make something that comes with a heavy cost. Obviously we don't have a way to know that until it exists. Then again, we should be able to start recognizing that particular chemical chains results in bad things so we should be super careful with the new thing because it is looks like something we've seen before. We can do this with virus and what not. Why not with chemistry?
moonchrome 4y ago
> On the surface they might not seem useful, but these discoveries develop sub-atomic models, which help predict atomic, and in turn molecular, models If those models had predictive power that translates to atomic scale you wouldn't need a multibillion collider to prove them.
- paskozdilar 4y ago
  If those models didn't have predictive power that translates to atomic scale, nobody would give them billions for a collider to prove them.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  I 99.99% agree. One of the few molecular level effects that depends on the virtual particles that are important in the standard model is the Lamb shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift In this case the virtual particle is a virtual photon, not a virtual weird particle, so it's just scratching the standard model. I'm not sure if the g-2 Anomalous magnetic dipole moment of electrons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_mome... can be measured with a cheap equipment.

aqme28 4y ago

Typically no, because higher energy collisions exist naturally with cosmic particles, so we would have probably observed some of these stable particles by now. But in practice they could be rare and hard to detect.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
I'm not even sure if "typically no" is justified here. We don't know what dark matter is, but we do know that it appears that there's a lot of it out there. You could definitely do some math and maybe if you were really clever about it relate the quantity of it that exists to exclude some particular energy range of interactions, but I don't think that's been done.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  The whole point of “dark matter” is it can’t be made of normal matter (ie quarks). (It might not even exist, after all…)
  - zamalek 4y ago
    WIMPs, were they to exist, would consist of regular matter.
    - shagie 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_par... > There exists no formal definition of a WIMP, but broadly, a WIMP is a new elementary particle which interacts via gravity and any other force (or forces), potentially not part of the Standard Model itself, which is as weak as or weaker than the weak nuclear force, but also non-vanishing in its strength. That's not regular matter. Its MACHOs that are made up of regular matter (well, brown dwarfs and black holes). There are also theories that put an undetected form of neutrino as dark matter which would be a bit more regular.

dariusj18 4y ago

It'd be cool if they could be created and combined in specific combinations and quantities to create new particles that wouldn't exist due to natural formation. Sounds like a good sci-fi mechanic, creating new particles without the Higgs Boson to facilitate FTL or at least some sort of anti-gravity.

simiones 4y ago
Note that the Higgs Boson has no part in the mass (and presumably gravitational interaction) of elementary fermions like quarks or electrons, and even less to do with the mass of hadrons (whose mass is the mass of quarks + the mass of the extraordinary amount of energy sticking the quarks together, which dwarfs the mass of the quarks by ~100:1). Even if all elementary particles were massless, protons, nuclei, and atoms would still have most of the mass they have today (though of course many other interactions would be very different indeed).
- jamincan 4y ago
  What is the Higgs Boson responsible for if it's not involved in the mass of fermions or hadrons?
  - simiones 4y ago
    The mass of the massive gauge bosons, the W and Z bosons. Edit: there is an excellent in-depth (but math-light) explanation about the Higgs mechanism by Leonard Susskind. I highly recommend it if you are interested, it lasts about 1h (plus some Q&A) and is extremely approachable, while being presented by an established authority in the field. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY
    - gmadsen 4y ago
      unless im wrong (im not a physicist) interaction with the higgs field does give a none zero amount of mass to quarks. but the vast majority of mass of a proton ~99% is due to the energy in the gluon field

chicX 4y ago

These particles are hadrons held together by the strong force. They all contain charm or strange quarks which are relatively heavy, and via the weak interactions, they can decay to hadrons containing light quarks. Because of the large mass difference between the charm and strange compared with the light quarks, it's unlikely that any of these will be stable. Lone neutrons are unstable, they decay in about 15 minutes to lighter particles. They have only a few MeV mass difference to the stable final state (the proton + electron + anti-neutrino). For comparison, these particles are 2000+ MeV above their ground states so they decay pretty quickly.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
sicne neutrons are stable in a neucleous, is it possible that there is any atom-like structure that is stable that contains at least one 'abnormal' particle, like a bozon, or any 'large' particle made of quarks that is not a proton or neutron?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

at_a_remove 4y ago

No. If a particle can decay into a lighter set of particles and still obey all of the conservation principles, they will. The heavier they are, the more they're going to decay and the more "options" they have to decay. An electron isn't going to do anything because there is nothing lighter than an electron that still carries charge, etc. Something much heavier, like a free neutron, will fall apart into a proton, an electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. These particles have options galore as to what they can fall apart into being, and so they do, and with great haste.

wesammikhail 4y ago
I know nothing about physics as it is not my domain. So I don't know if what you're saying is true or not. But if it is, I find that notion somewhat poetic. For the sake of my own edification, I'd like to follow this up with a few somewhat seemingly dumb questions if you dont mind: Is it the case that a given particle is trying to settle into a "lowest energy state" possible? I am not using physics terms here. More like conceptually, are these particles, due to the number of options available to them, decaying into the lightest stable variant allowed by the laws of physics? if that is the case, then could we perhaps find ways to engineer structures within which these particles last for a whole lot longer than they should (on a human timescale)? And what is stopping us from doing that? is it the energy cost associated with such a structure/device or is there a more fundamental reason we cant do that?
- samstave 4y ago
  (I' in the exact same boat as you) --- >>trying to settle into a "lowest energy state" possible? What if its actually the reverse: Its attempting and succeeding to be the most it can be given the eddy of forces around it - the particle is "becoming" - not "falling apart"
- sethhovestol 4y ago
  It is the case that particles always try to settle into the lowest energy, and the more options they have the faster. We may be able to engineer places where they're stable, like in the example from my grandparent of a neutron. They are unstable since their mass is greater than the mass of a proton and an electron combined, but they're stable in all common elements we're used to. So much so that we think of radioactive elements as the exception, but (mostly) all that's happening there (in beta decay) is a neutron decaying. I'm not an expert, but I'd imagine making a stable situation for a heavier particle much harder than just making an atom, and the fine grained control is even hard still.